The Most Impossible of Fairy Tales

I met him in person in September of 2013. In a place that held a lot of memories for us both separately, but neither of us called home. He took my hand and led me up a stone staircase that he helped create months earlier when we were still strangers. For anyone else it would have seemed like nonsense to spend our first date in this place, but for us it was perfect. For us it was almost magical. From that moment on, what existed between us was undeniable.

Six months later he was transplanting his whole life – from family and friends to his livelihood, his passions, and his hobbies to make a life with me. He was leaving all the things he knew to take a chance on a whole new existence that included two little girls. Without anything familiar to guide him, he trusted me to love him. He trusted me to let him take care of me just as I would take care of him. He left all those things to build new things and did those things ever grow…

In 53 days he will become my husband, but in 24 hours he will be heading across the country to a place where as strangers we connected; where we knew that we were meant to spend our lives together. I will miss him because he won’t be close enough to touch, but he will be going back to the place that crossed our paths. And if he were not the man that longed to be in those green mountains we would never have met. That place is where the fibers of “me” and “he” became a tapestry of “us.”

So I will try to not be sad that he’s leaving tomorrow. I will focus on what I know is true. I am grateful that he is the man who would have the courage to endure the pain and challenge of building the stairs that led to our first meeting, the man who would have the faith to leave his life to join a new one 17 hours away, the man who would commit himself to that new life and offer his remaining days to support and help build the days ahead. I am thankful that he has chosen me. I hope he knows that I have chosen him right back.

So, I am grateful to have fallen in love with a man that has the persistence to return… two years later to that fateful place where we first intersected, to finish what he started before there was a “we” and an “us.” I only hope that when it becomes hard, he feels me in the wind and sees me in the sky and that somehow he draws comfort and strength in those thoughts. That he remembers all the steps he took from that first journey until now…

I couldn’t possibly love him more. For the man he was before I even knew he existed to the man that made me realize it was finally possible to believe in the most impossible of fairy tales.